Just finished up the Sitecore Chicagoland Meetup and what a great time it was. Many attended and it was one of the best turnouts I have seen in any meetup. Lots of partners and clients attended.

The meetup started with a tour of Shure Incorporated. I don’t know too much about mics and broadcasting. However I learned quite a lot of the history of Shure and I got to see some really cool things. Maybe I should replace my Yeti microphone?

The first speaker was Craig Burkhart from Ecolab. I always like to hear Craig speak. He has a lot to share about his recent and current journey with personalization and using AI. They are using a great tech stack including the Content Hub (one of my favorites). Some of the highlights:

• Personalized content based on visitor’s profile.
• Creation of language specific content and measuring how well it is interpreted.
• Breaking out the way their content is created and delivered.

Next up was Luke Pace from Perficient. He did a great presentation on using Headless, Next.js and Vercel for XM Cloud.It was great to hear the challenges and obstacles he was able to overcome and deliver a great product. Highlights include the following:

• Optimizing and trimming your deliverables.
• Creating efficient links with next/link.
• Enabling and using Vercel Fluid Complete.

What a great time and can’t wait for the next one. The combined effort of Chicago based partners has really made a difference.